The NAACP Still Fights for Quality of Life Improvements for People of Color by Kweisi Mfume

From its inception in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has fought for civil rights, educational opportunity, voting rights and economic opportunity. While the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision ending legal school segregation is perhaps the most famous NAACP legal victory regarding education, the Association has in the past 30 years continued its legacy of activism in education. It has also continued to register hundreds of thousands of voters and encouraged Black people to vote for their rights under our Constitution. The best example of that was in the recent local and national elections.

In key states such as Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Georgia and Alabama, NAACP Get-Out-The-Vote efforts turned out a record number of African-American voters. Unfortunately many of the votes in Florida were not counted, but we made a difference in the other states. In Missouri, for example, it was the Black vote that defeated Sen. John Ashcroft in his bid for reelection. It was the Black vote that resulted in victory for Selma, Alabama's, first Black mayor and it was that same vote that made the difference in at least a dozen House and Senate races in which the margin of victory was less than five percent. But while we celebrate the victories and political gains made during the past year as well as the last three decades, the Florida fiasco reminds us that there is still much more to be done. On Martin Luther King's birthday, NAACP branches across the nation launched a Dignity Campaign to register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new voters for the mid-term elections in 2002. We are not only registering new voters, we are also making sure they are trained to pull the correct levers and properly punch the correct ballots. We are prepared to do whatever it takes to make sure that their votes count. Some people will argue after the presidential election that voting is not important, that you really can't make a difference by voting because the establishment is going to do what they want to do. I reject that type of folly. Voting can and does make a real difference.

I was elected 22 years ago to the Baltimore City Council by a margin of just three votes. It was the closest election in the history of Maryland. If two people had stayed home or forgot to vote, most people would have never heard of me and I probably would not have ever become a congressman or for that matter the president of the NAACP.

While many of the hard-earned civil rights gains of the past three decades are under assault, the NAACP, with the support of its national staff and volunteers; 2,200 units covering all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea, has continued working to improve the quality of life for people of color. We celebrate the progress made in the past three decades, but we cannot rest on our laurels. Some of the biggest challenges facing us in the next three decades are economic development, political empowerment and educational excellence. On the issue of education in particular, the NAACP started in 1977 to assist branches to institute local grassroots activities to improve public education. The NAACP's Academic, Cultural, Technological, Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), which began in 1978, allows minority students to receive recognition for their academic achievements on par with students who are recognized because of their athletic achievements. In 1987, the NAACP instituted a Back To School/Stay in School Program to provide branches and chapters with guidance for effectively partnering with local schools, school districts and state agencies to address the problem of school dropouts and poor graduation rates for African American students.

The NAACP partners each fall with the Princeton Review Corporation to provide students and parents in more than 10 urban areas with SAT Preparation and financial aid consultation. Recognizing the need to place good data and research behind resolutions and program development, in January 2001, we laid the ground work for the NAACP Educational Research and Advocacy Institute to be composed of some of the top educational scholars and practitioners in the country.

Just like in politics, I learned firsthand the importance of education. Although I was first educated on the streets of Baltimore, my formal education began in the Baltimore City Public School System. I later attended and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Morgan State University and earned a master's degree from The Johns Hopkins University. Three decades ago, I was the editor of the student newspaper at Community College of Baltimore when THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine was created in 1970. I learned then that education was the best vehicle to begin overturning the status quo that historically repressed and marginalized African Americans. I didn't know it then, but as editor of the student newspaper and later co-founder of the Black Student Union; I had started down the road that would lead to much of what I do today.

As we embark on the new millennium, the major challenges facing us still include education, political and economic empowerment. Although they won't serve as remedies to solve all of our problems, these three areas are key to improving our communities and reducing the number of young people that we lose everyday to the pathologies that eat at our communities. The NAACP has put into place programs aimed at meeting these challenges in the 21st Century, but we still need foot soldiers in this battle.

Kweisi Mfume is the president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.